What If Your Family Doesn’t Support Your Writing?
Most writers don't get much support from family. Why relatives call it a hobby, why their feedback won't help you, and how to keep writing for the people who show up.
Category: Writing (Page 6)
Artificial IntelligenceWill AI Steal My Book? Turn Off Training Before You Upload
Using AI to critique your manuscript won't get your book stolen, but most chatbots can train on what you upload unless you turn it off. Here's why I switched it off on day one, and where the real theft happens.
FictionShould You Only Use “Said” in Dialogue Tags? My Rules for Tags and Adverbs
Readers skim right past dialogue tags, so use the plain ones and don't bury anything important in them. My simple rules for said, tag variety, adverbs and action beats.
SocietyWhy Are Writing Groups So Hostile?
You'd think writers would be kind to each other. Writing groups are some of the cruelest rooms online. Why rejection, fear and status drive it, why the polite groups don't help either, and what a good group looks like.
PublishingWhat Belongs on a Copyright Page
Readers never look at it. Librarians and cataloguers do, and if the information is not there they stop reading and move on. You never find out.
MemoirsHow to Organize Decades of Memories Into a Memoir
Decades of experience only become a readable memoir with structure. How to choose an organizing principle, decide what stays, and shape raw memory into a book someone wants to read.
GhostwritingWhy Fiverr Sucks for Ghostwriting: The Buyer’s Side
You can buy a ghostwritten book on Fiverr for a few hundred dollars. The arithmetic of what that buys is not a secret and not a matter of opinion, and it explains what arrives. This is the buyer's side, written…
WritingBooks to Give a Writer
There are four books that get given to writers, and anyone who has been writing for more than a year owns all four. This is a guide to what to give instead, organized by what the person is struggling with…
WritingThe Beach Read Argument
Calling a book a beach read is usually a way of praising it while making clear you are not taking it seriously. The assumption underneath is that easy reading means easy writing, and that assumption is exactly backwards.
WritingWhy It’s a Wonderful Life Failed on Release
It's a Wonderful Life lost money, disappointed its studio, ended the production company its director had staked everything on, and was flagged by the FBI as possible communist propaganda. It became a Christmas institution decades later because a clerk failed…
WritingWhat to Read in Spring
Spring is the best season for difficult books and almost nobody uses it that way. The light is long, the energy is back, nothing is competing, and the hard book you keep postponing has a better chance in April than…
WritingWhat to Read in Summer
Summer is the only season most people get a genuinely uninterrupted stretch of days, and that makes it the season for the long book. A nine-hundred-page novel needs consecutive days more than it needs concentration, and nothing else in the…